Environment – GSSR and the Vault

[For the hiatus, I’m going to be posting a bunch of the development art I made for the series. It’ll be posted in the order it was made, leading up to the week the comic resumes]

This was an exciting part for me, the part where we get to visit a location that frequently appeared back in the precursor comic, Cat Comixz. That location is the Golden Snow Ski Resort, or GSSR for short.

I knew going into this chapter that Trinity was going to have to inform Leon (and by extension, the readers) about the importance of this location. Eventually I settled on doing a holodeck/VR thing, to add some much needed visual flair to what was, ultimately, an exposition dump.

Being able to revisit this location was a fun challenge… mostly because I had realized that I didn’t actually make any good exterior shots of what the GSSR looks like, so that had to be pretty much summoned from scratch. I settled on making it a very tacky tourist resort thing, with tons of other activities set up nearby the slopes. The references of the interior weren’t much more detailed, so I just continued the logical aesthetic to its conclusion.

The vault was a new part. By the time I was coming in to draw it, I really only had the basic concept of “a vault” in my mind. I wanted to try and differentiate it a little bit from the rest of the aesthetics we would see in KttFF, to add to its strange nature. Despite being just stone with strange symbols on it, nobody has been able to open it, even in the future… but what exactly is behind that door?